Birmingham's legendary club was the place to be - but you had to look smart

“And I wouldn’t have let that lot in,
either,” he says angrily, pointing at a press cutting about Duran Duran, whose name is synonymous with the Broad Street venue.

Now
78, Solihull-based Don feels it’s time to set the record straight about
the nightspot, indelibly linked in most minds with the 1980s supergroup.

He plans to write a book about his experiences at what was THE place to be in the 1960s, a smart and respectable joint which attracted the likes of George
Best and Tommy Cooper – and some of the nation’s most sadistic gangsters – to sample the food and entertainment on offer.

Oh, and nurses got in for free.

Legend
tells how Don’s nephews Paul and Michael Berrow allowed the fledgling Duran Duran to rehearse and perform at the Rum Runner before later managing the group.

“All the business people would come, and if Tommy Cooper was on in Birmingham, at the Hippodrome, he would come for a meal.

“George
Best was in there very often. He had a table when Manchester United were in town. I can’t remember him being in trouble, or drunk.”

Don
studied business and catering at Birmingham College of Food and Technology before he and brothers Ray, Peter and Terrence, sister Georgina and original licensee Tony Hurley each pitched in with £6,500 to open the venue in 1964.

The
siblings’ dad Peter had moved his bookies shop to a vacant unit next to
what would be the entrance tunnel to the club in the late 50s.

Before
he died in 1961, he saw the potential for a restaurant in the former glass factory beneath the shop, backing on to part of the city’s vast canal network.

“We
were limited for money and I was going round looking for stuff,” says Don, who was also keeping up the family betting business and tending to his parents’ 15th century Berry Hall Farm, off Hampton Lane in Solihull.

“On the top floor, the fourth floor of the Post and Mail building were all the kitchens.

“I
bought all the equipment for £70 – stainless steel fridges, cooker, washing-up units, the carving table in the middle, all the steel fittings around the kitchen.

“I had to crane them down on to a lorry with this other fella at 6am on a Sunday.”

The venue quickly took shape, with five 7ft-high wine barrels from France providing unique interior features.

“It
was hard to get staff, because it was a completely new thing – our licence was roughly until midnight but was extended to 2am or 3am,” remembers Don, who claims to have been the most ‘hands-on’ of all his siblings at the club.

“The best restaurants were the Midland, Queen’s and the Grand on Colmore Row,
but cooking staff used to cook from 6pm to 8.30pm, not late like we wanted.”

Don Berrow looks through some old newspaper cuttings.

Don’s old college principal Louis Klein sent for his son Marcel, plying his trade in France, to become the venue’s first chef and the club’s reputation for fine food at knock-down prices quickly grew.

But the venue, which first had Norris Barnes’s dance band in residency, soon started to veer more towards rock and roll.

Mick Walker, of popular Walsall band The Redcaps, started working there in a managerial role.

His brother Dave, later of Fleetwood Mac, fronted his band Beckett in regular slots from 1965.

Queuing up with their seven shillings and sixpence admission were future members of The Move and Black Sabbath.

“If they hadn’t got a jacket or tie on I would sling them out,” Don says.

“They’d come back looking smarter, although sometimes they would sneak in when I wasn’t looking!

“If
I happened to be walking through and catch them I’d say ‘out of here!’ Bev Bevan and Ozzy Osbourne were the two main ones. I threw Bev out of the restaurant three or four times.

“Ozzy wouldn’t say much – he wouldn’t argue.”

Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath

Guest artists soon begged to play at the venue. “We got Lulu for a fraction of what she was worth,” Don smiles.

“They
wanted to be on at the Rum Runner for sales, for publicity. I nearly slung her out. Her band was late and she was on the verge of being thrown out, but then they turned up.”

Notorious womaniser Tom Jones also had a slot at the club, which closed to make way for the Hyatt Hotel in 1987.

Don
says: “The main thing I remember about that was him saying ‘there’s a couple of birds there – get hold of them two and get them to the dressing room after’.”

Top of the tree for Don were US legends the Everly Brothers. He knocked them down from £2,000 to £800 for a week-long stint.

“They
were colossal – all those others we had on, they left them stone cold. They must have spent what they earned in the restaurant – they were there till 4am every night.”

Don,
a keen athlete and boxer in his teens, even stood up to the Kray twins and their planned protection racket – and survived intact.

“A dwarf came in and sat on the desk swinging his legs,” he remembers.

“He
said: ‘Pay us a hundred quid a week and we’ll look after you’. I said: ‘Look after yourselves – I’ve told the coppers’. The police got him, and
a couple of fellas – I didn’t know who they were.

“They pulled them over in a car and that was the end of them. Then I found out they had come from the Krays.”

Ronnie and Reggie’s underworld adversaries the Richardson Gang were also unwelcome visitors for around a year.

“The
police said: ‘We don’t want you to sling them out, because we know where they are, to watch them, and we don’t want any trouble’.

“It was the best place to go and they knew it was the best. These people – you were doing them a favour to come in.

“There was no advertising or anything like that – it was just a full house every night.”